As well-known, a person with a health issue such as heart disease usually needs to be examined regularly and better to be monitored continually for the early signs of those health problems. Although there are many instruments or devices available for monitoring an individual's activities and evaluating their health states, a person with health issue needs to visit periodically a medical facility to obtain the proper diagnosis and medical treatment. Once at the medical facility, the subject is usually examined with some type of medical instruments for the short duration. The health information obtained during the visit only represents a small portion of the subject's physiological information at the time of the examination, which usually does not reflect the actual health problem occurring in the daily life. In order to obtain more complete medical information, doctors would need to observe a subject's health condition over certain duration usually longer than that of regular health examination. Because of time and costs associated with these tests and observations, it is usually impractical to conduct the required long-term observation and full evaluation for most people who may need them.
Another major issue for many individuals is getting prompt medical instruction and care as soon as a health problem occurs. To detect an occupying health problem in time and then to provide a prompt health care is crucial to the individual's health. For example, a heart attack victim will have a significantly greater chance of full recovery if medical care is received as soon as a heart attack is detected. As another example, an early detection of the sleep apnea can give an individual good opportunity to take necessary actions to prevent the serious sleep-disordered breathing problem from developing. Unfortunately, an individual usually does not recognize the early signs which indicate an occurring risk. Quite often, by the time the individual does realize an occurring risk, they might be incapable of seeking for medical assistance. Another issue is to provide quick and accurate information for the necessary medical care, which is essential to a successful diagnosis and treatment of the health problem.
The patent application U.S. Pat. No. 6,579,231, Personal Medical Monitoring Unit and System by Phipps, has disclosed a personal medical monitoring unit and system, which is a portable unit worn by a subject, comprising a medical monitoring device, a data processing module with memory and transmitter for collecting, monitoring, and storing the subject's physiological data and also issuing the subject's medical alarm conditions via wireless communications network to the appropriate location for expeditious dispatch of assistance. The unit also works in conjunction with a central reporting system for long term collection and storage of the subject's physiological data. The unit may have the capability to automatically dispense chemicals that may alleviate or assist in recovery from an illness. The Personal Medical Monitoring Unit and System disclosed in the invention continuously monitors a subject's medical data values as it receives them from the medical monitoring devices, which may be any standard medical monitoring device that is capable of providing data to another device. The invention has focused on the personal portable unit with data processing capability in connection with various types of medical monitoring devices through utilizing wireless communication technology.
Cox, et al. disclosed another healthcare system in the patent U.S. Pat. No. 4,679,144. In this patent, an apparatus for monitoring EKG information includes a programmable apparatus carried by an ambulatory patient for performing continuous, real-time analyses of EKG information derived from the patient. The apparatus facilitates the determination of the existence of various conditions based on these analyses which portend cardiac complications including myocardial ischemia, and arrhythemia activity and further instructs the patient on the manner of treatment required for the detected condition. As stated, the healthcare system is for ambulatory patient and only monitors EKG related information.
Oliver, et al. has presented a technical report (MSR-TR-2005-182) “HealthGear: A Real-time Wearable System for Monitoring and Analyzing Physiological Signals”. HealthGear as proposed is a real-time wearable system for monitoring, visualizing and analyzing physiological signals. The data streams from the physiological sensors are constantly transmitted to a cell phone via Bluetooth for signal processing and message display. Because of wireless transmission via Bluetooth and constant data streams between sensors and cell phone, the power consumption of the system is high and the size of the monitoring system is still large. A summary up to the date is present, in which various researches on wearable health monitoring technologies and devices have been reviewed. Most of research and developments have been focused on non-invasive physiological sensors, wireless sensor network such as Personal Area Network (PAN) or Body Area Network (BAN), real-time physiological signal monitoring and cellular connection to a medical center through wireless connection via Bluetooth to a cell phone.
All available health monitoring systems and proposed inventions up today have the similar challenges for an easy wearable healthcare system with small size, low power consumption, low cost and high intelligence without limiting user's freedoms and mobility. One of the top common challenges is the communication among various sensors, central processing unit and the user. Therefore, most of the front-running research and development for the wearable healthcare system has focused on wireless sensor network such as Personal Area Network (PAN) or Body Area Network (BAN) for the sensor data transmission between sensors and central processing unit. Although wireless technology for local area network has made it possible to communicate the constant data streams of sensors to the central processing unit, it has serious limitations such as system complexity, device size, power consumption, reliability of the wireless body area network, interference from environment and user health affection possibly induced by the constant wireless signals around body all the times. Therefore, if possible, it is always desired to minimize the use of wireless for the concerns of environment interference, possible health affection caused by RF signal field, device size, power consumption and affordability for majority of population.
Accordingly, there is a need for an intelligent healthcare system and service that can provide continuous and intelligent health monitoring, analyzing and storing a subject's medical information while allowing the subject complete freedom and mobility with extremely small size, easy to wear, low power consumption, low cost, high intelligence and reliable to use with the minimized use of wireless communication for the emergent or requested communication.